Jocelyn had strolled away by herself--she had a longing to be alone with
the sea. She did not know exactly what it was that she wanted, but it
seemed to her that the sea would give her a feeling of rest. She was
annoyed presently to find Nielsen beside her. He had humbly brought her
the service of his green-lined umbrella, and she had not the heart to
send him away, when he asked gently if he bored her.
They strolled together towards a group of rocks that jutted in a blunt,
curving point into the sea.
“I want to get on that little green rock,” said Jocelyn, pointing to the
furthermost rock separated from the others by an eddy of rippling,
shallow water. In a moment she had whipped off her shoes and stockings,
and with skirts raised to her ankles, was scrambling through the ripples
of the circling waves, up the slippery, green slope of the rock.
Nielsen regarded her proceedings from the beach with an air of comical
dismay and admiration.
“Take care, my dear young lady,” he kept on saying, rolling his r’s more
than usual. His eyeglass was damp with the interest of his glance, and
his umbrella hung uselessly over his shoulder.
“Come along,” said Jocelyn, “I thought you used to be an athlete?”
“It was not the part of the athlete in my day to climb slipperry rocks
with young ladies,” he said plaintively, gallantly removing a boot, and
standing on one leg in an amiable hesitation.
“_Mais en verité_,” he muttered to himself, drawing off the other boot
and revealing pink socks, in the toe of one of which was a decided hole;
“she is not a milk and butter Miss, _cette chère_ Jocelyn,” and he
hastily divested himself of the holey sock.
Jocelyn having reached the summit, dropped her skirts, and, shading her
face with her hand from the burning sun, looked over the hesitating
Nielsen at the lines of the bay, that curved in under the stony,
sparsely-covered mountains.
It was one of those cloudless Riviera days, when, seen from behind the
sun, the coast loses all other colouring in the vivid tints of the sky
and sea. The blue of the distant Esterelles melted in the far west into
the paler blue of the heavens, and all the nearer hills and jutting
promontories were bathed in a wonderful violet ether. One ultimate snowy
peak reared itself aloft, emerging triumphant from the trammels of the
light. Looking eastwards, where the sun had already sped his course,
every line and patch of colouring was thrown into an intense relief. The
white houses stared along the stony, drab slopes. The Campanile with the
little black cross upon its summit, sprang up high over the old town of
Bordighera, against masses of glistening olives beyond. Along a far spur
of the hills an old Italian village stretched in straggling seclusion.
Jocelyn bent over to look into the turquoise pools that lapped with
white edges round the green, weed-covered rocks, and now and again
caught the shadowy gleam of a fish in the cloudy-blue water. On the next
rock to her, two picturesque bare-legged fishers angled lazily with
twelve-foot rods of stiff bamboo. The breeze caught her hair, and she
turned and looked away over the sea, drawing the soft, salt air through
her nostrils with an intense feeling of pleasure.
She was in one of her gipsy moods--it was good to set her back to the
land, to those eternal ridges of hills which forced upon her a feeling
of imprisonment; very good to turn to the sea, the salt sea, stretching
before her in blue, illimitable vastness.
A wonderful glow of life and freedom came upon her with the beating of
the soft wind against her face. She felt a wild desire to spread her
wings in a long, long flight to a freer life, like the little,
lateen-rigged fishing smack, running from the land before the wind--a
flight away from convention, and the eternal need for repression; away
from all her fears, from the horror which sometimes came over her, from
the unconfessed longing which fought against it within her breast; away,
into a solitude as great as the sea itself, where no other
individualities should besiege her own, giving her a sense of
suffocation--a solitude, where there should be no knowledge, and no
distrust.
Nielsen’s gently imperturbable voice recalled her.
“I am coming, my dear young lady; just a little patience, it is very
slipperry, don’t you see.” He was picking a gingerly way with his bare
feet from one stone to another.
“Go back,” she cried almost harshly. “I’m coming off!”
What was the use of her wild thoughts! She was bound! bound to that
undefined struggle which, whether she would or no, was always going on
within her. Her face clouded with its wonted look of defeat, and she
sighed. She waited till Nielsen was returning, and then waded back
herself.
The feelings which the sea had roused in her made her irritable.
“It’s a dull sea--the Mediterranean,” she said from one side of a rock,
putting on her shoes and stockings, “no tides, no ebb and flow; what a
monotony! I wonder it finds it worth while to break on its shores at
all!”
“You would not say that if you saw it in a storm,” came, in plaintive,
half-choked parenthesis, from the other side of the rock, where the
discreet Swede was also resuming his boots.
“It manages to break on every shore all round; I should like to know
where it parts its hair,” continued Jocelyn meditatively.
“My dear young lady, it is like the bald-headed man, don’t you know; it
does not part its hair at all, it has no hair to part in the middle,
don’t you see, only a fringe that falls on all sides.”
Nielsen appeared suddenly from round the rock, his hat in his hand,
smoothing his own well-covered, flaxen head appreciatively.
Jocelyn laughed gently. She had finished her toilet, and sat looking up
at him with her head a little on one side, and her feet drawn under her
skirts. Nielsen moved a step towards her, and his brown eyes glowed.
“Do you know you are quite charrming! May I not--“--he bent his head to
her hand.
“Please don’t!” she said impatiently.
She had lately found it difficult to take the sentimental remarks of the
enamoured Swede as a matter of course.
“Forgive me,” said Nielsen humbly, “you are so beautiful, you see!”
“I would rather you didn’t talk like that, please,” said Jocelyn.
She rose and held out her hand to him frankly; Nielsen took it in his
own, letting it go with a deep sigh.
Jocelyn restrained an inclination to laugh.
“What is that ship?” she asked, as they made their way towards the
others. Nielsen screwed his eyeglass into his eye.
“A ‘messageries’ for China and the Indies; she will call at Genoa.”
Jocelyn’s eyes followed the great, black steamer racing past. The foam
was churning up from under its bows, and along its sides. She looked at
it wistfully with wide eyes--the longing was not out of her yet. Nielsen
fastened on the look intuitively.
“If you would marry me, you should do that or anything else that you
liked,” he said suddenly, pointing to the steamer “I am not verry poor
now, you know--the ‘system’ has been verry good to me lately.”
There was an earnestness in his voice, that was in strong contrast to
its habitual suave flattery, and his allusion to the “system”--which,
with a gambler’s superstition, he never mentioned--struck Jocelyn. She
stopped and looked at him.
Yes! He was evidently in earnest; the innumerable little lines and
crow’s-feet in his face, showed cruelly in the blazing sunshine; he was
paler than usual, and he looked at her with almost a dog’s look in his
weary brown eyes. But all she said was--
“I think you spend too much time over the ‘system’!”
She had caught sight of Giles’s figure against the rock, and she felt a
sudden, physical repulsion to the man standing beside her.
“But understand,” said Nielsen, “I love you--I love you! You cannot
prevent that, you know.” He put out his hands, as if to take her in his
arms, and his face twitched.
“Are you mad?” she cried, hurrying past him. She walked swiftly over the
hard sand, and as she went a curious feeling came upon her, a feeling of
delight that was almost pain. She had forgotten Nielsen, but the words,
“I love you--I love you,” kept echoing within her; they had lost all
sound and form, they had become like the breath of an inspiration. All
her being rose in a trembling answer. A wave of crimson rushed into her
face, and as she hastened she plucked nervously at the single yellow
rose fastened in her dress. Nielsen stood still, looking after her. A
minute later, however, he was beside her again, talking commonplaces
with his usual plaintive, imperturbable drawl, his face showing no
traces of its recent emotion.
When they reached the others, Jocelyn threw herself down by her aunt,
close to a group of sea-washed rocks, through the broken crevices of
which the little waves were leaping and flashing like white fairies at
play; and when Giles came up, two minutes later, she seemed to be
listening gaily to a story Nielsen was telling.
Mrs. Travis, fanning herself, insinuated gentle complaints of the heat.
She wished to see the palm gardens, where it looked shady.
Giles led the way with alacrity; he longed to have Jocelyn to himself,
with all the concentrated longing of many hours of repression. Mrs.
Travis was soon in rapt admiration of the shrubs and flowers; and she
impressed Nielsen into her service to make a bargain in French with the
florist proprietor, for a weekly provision of flowers to be sent to
Mentone, standing by to afford assistance; she had a great and wholly
warranted faith in her powers of cheapening things.
Giles and Jocelyn strolled away from them, and were soon hidden by the
thick palm foliage. The garden wound up and down in a mass of flowering
plants and scented shrubs.
“It’s a kind of paradise,” said Giles, “rather cut and dried in parts.”
“Yes,” Jocelyn assented--“‘the trail of the florist is over it all.’ But
the scents are good; I love the dear flowers.” She plucked a spray of
roses daringly, and pinned them in the breast of her dress.
“I was always a thief with flowers, you know; I can’t help it, I _have_
to steal them.”
Presently they followed a little path running upwards at the top of the
garden. It led them on to a rocky knoll over which, in a ring of spikey
aloes and grotesque prickly pears, a shady olive spread its shimmering
branches like a tent. Jocelyn seated herself beneath it, looking down
upon the wilderness of the garden foliage. In her white skirt and pale
silver-green blouse, she looked like the spirit of the tree, as she
leant against the trunk with the yellow sunlight playing fantastically
on her through the quivering leaves.
A bare and stony hill sloped behind them, planted here and there with
vines and rose-trees, which served only to throw into a greater relief
its yellow-grey harshness. In front, the tangled masses of palms and
plants, the plain, unpretentious white houses straggling along the
shore, and the straight line of the railway running beside the sea, gave
the scene the unfinished look of some sub-tropical settlement. Across
the dipped valley, under the lee of a high, rounded hill covered with
olives and glancing green fig-trees, a little church spire rose modestly
and incongruously out of a mass of palms.
Giles, who had turned the brim of his Panama hat down, like a mushroom,
over his neck, lay on his face in the sun, looking up at Jocelyn. Her
beauty, and the impelling, passionate yearning within him, deprived him
helplessly of the power of speech. She was sitting with her hand on
Shikari’s head, smelling at the flowers in her dress, her figure swaying
a little as she hummed to herself.
Her cheeks were still flushed, and her eyes bright from that strange
emotion.
She began to sing a little Finnish song that he knew well, with notes
that suggested “sobbing” for a refrain. She had a tiny voice,
“_niedlich_,” as the Germans say. But in the middle of a verse she
stopped suddenly and pointed with her ungloved hand at a large,
yellow-fanged drover’s dog, which had appeared on the side of the knoll.
Shikari sprang up with a growl, his teeth showing. The two dogs
approached one another snarling, and before Giles could rise to prevent
them, had each other by the throat, and were rolling over and over on
the ground. He leaped hastily to his feet, and gripped Shikari hard by
the collar; getting a purchase with his foot against the other dog’s
shoulder, with a violent, pushing kick, he sent him sprawling down the
slope.
As he turned his head for a second, he saw Jocelyn holding Shikari with
her arms laced round his neck--the dog was growling and licking her face
at the same time--but in another minute the drover’s dog came up the
slope again, and, with a savage snarl, sprang at his throat.
Throwing out both hands stiffly, he caught at the brute’s neck, but his
grip slipped on the short, wiry hair, and the impetus of the dog’s
spring carried him backwards on to the ground.
Jocelyn saw his hands slip, saw him stagger, and fall; it seemed
impossible to her that he could keep those hideous fangs from his
throat. Involuntarily she threw her hands up to her eyes. She had a
mental vision of a torn throat--a gaping, jagged wound. A cloud of hot,
whirling dust rose from the dry ground, where the man and beast were
struggling. For one second of sheer horror she stood still, her face
crimson and as suddenly white, then with a little cry she ran towards
them; but the struggle was already over. The first movement of her hands
had released the greyhound. The drover’s dog had turned with his teeth
on Giles’s throat to attack his old enemy, and Giles scrambling to his
feet, had seized his stick, dealing the brute a heavy blow, which half
stunned him.
Jocelyn saw him leaning over the two dogs, a hand twisted in the collar
of each, his face very pale, his figure strained with the effort of
holding them apart; his clothes were covered with dust, and he bled
from a scratch on one hand. He released the cowed brute, who slunk away
down the hill, and stood up, breathing hard, keeping a foot on Shikari,
who growled angrily.
Jocelyn went softly up to him. Even now, seeing him erect, she hardly
dared look at his throat, so vivid was the memory of the wound that had
gleamed, red and angry, before her covered eyes.
She gave a little choke and put out her hands.
When he felt the touch of her fingers on his shoulder he faced her
suddenly. In the moments of fierce excitement, when his muscles and his
nerves had been strung and braced, all thought of Jocelyn had left him,
he had felt only the fighting fever and the consciousness of strength;
but his blood was coursing wildly through his veins, and the touch of
those fingers was like a spark to a magazine. All his passion returned
with tenfold strength.
He faced her with blazing eyes, and his lips quivered.
“Are you hurt, Giles?” she said.
Her eyes were bent on him with a strained look, the black pupils
expanding; and her lips were tremulous and parted.
“My darling!” he cried, “did you care?”
She looked at him, frightened at his words, yet wondering he should ask.
“Care? Yes.”
“I love you, Jocelyn, I love you! My God! What am I saying?”
He bent his head down to the level of her hands; one of them stole up
and smoothed his hair with a little shrinking caress. When he looked
again, her eyes were soft and wet, and he knew somehow that she had been
glad.
He was nearly choked by the joy that leaped in his heart, but the tears
in her eyes helped him to a mastery of himself.
“Dear,” he said, “I am sorry, I couldn’t help it! Forget it--forgive me,
I couldn’t help it--you are so sweet and lovely--so sweet and
lovely--after all, you knew it long ago.”
He spoke in short, broken sentences, catching his breath with gasps.
She smiled at him softly and sadly, and for one moment he caught, as in
a revelation, the love-light in her eyes. Her lips still trembled; with
her hands she brushed the dust mechanically from his clothes.
She looked swiftly up at him.
“I was so frightened,” she said, “I thought--” and covered her eyes with
her hands, shuddering.
He caught them in his, and stood looking down upon her dark head. He
could see the little fluffy hair on her neck, and her shoulders heaving
softly. He was too happy to speak; and he was afraid--afraid of the
passionate words that rose to his lips. The dry leaves of the olive tree
rustled crisply over their heads, and from the road below came the
tinkle of cowbells.
Voices broke in upon their silence. They went down in answer to Mrs.
Travis’s calling, and as they went, Giles said softly--
“Whatever comes, dear, this has been the hour of my life.”
They drove home without stopping at the villa, putting Nielsen down at
the Ventimiglia station. He had been very silent on the return journey.
He said to Jocelyn when he left them--
“I must get back to Monte Carrlo, you know, and appease the Fates for my
desertion.”
As they passed the last hill into Mentone the evening light was already
spreading, mellow and soft, over the town, and the sun was dying behind
the Esterelles. The tired little horses, toiling up the steep ascent,
nodded their heads diligently.
Jocelyn and Giles got out to walk. Half-way up, Jocelyn stopped and
stretched out her arms, saying with a sigh--
“Look! The evening is coming over everything, like a cool blessing,
gentle--gentle--”
“Yes!” said Giles. Their eyes met for one moment, and not another word
was said.
When they reached the hotel, he took his leave of them. Jocelyn turned
on the steps.
“_Buona Sera!_ my friend!” she said. “_Buona Sera!_” She gave him her
hand for a second time. Her eyes looked unnaturally large in the
uncertain light. Giles stood with his hat off till she had
disappeared--he could not speak.